


The Longest Road

by pinstripedJackalope



Category: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Series - Mackenzi Lee
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Car Accidents, Character Death, Death, Dementia, Epilepsy, Kinda, M/M, Pneumonia, Sick Character, Sick Percy Newton, Sickfic, Songfic, Suicide, it'll make sense trust me, like almost 30
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22709875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Percy has been sick for a while now.  This is the worst-case scenario.
Relationships: Henry "Monty" Montague/Percy Newton, Percy Newton & Scipio
Comments: 18
Kudos: 28





	The Longest Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goldenthunderstorms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenthunderstorms/gifts).
  * Inspired by [soon you'll get better](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22537267) by [goldenthunderstorms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenthunderstorms/pseuds/goldenthunderstorms). 



> I’m going to tear your heart out but it’s okay because @goldenthunderstorms gave me permission.
> 
> The title and the lyrics in the piece are from Longest Road by Morgan Page.

**You go down the longest road to nowhere**

Two weeks before I die, I am diagnosed with acute kidney failure.

Monty stands beside my bed, pale and wan but still healthy in contrast to me. I hate that it’s always a contrast between the two of us—light-skinned, flamboyant, extroverted Monty set against me, the shy one, the dark one, the sick one. 

I swallow hard behind the oxygen mask, my hands lying limp in my lap as Dr. Robles tells us what my body is failing to do now.

It’s not really a surprise. I knew something was wrong, just didn’t know what it was, exactly. If I’d been forced to take a guess, my guess would have been everything. That everything is wrong. Everything has come off the rails, skidding on ice on a highway overpass, the guard rail scrap metal under the weight of the semi-truck careening through it. And the funny thing is, that guess wouldn’t be too far off, because the votes are in and the infection has spread to my blood. My organs are starting to fail. I haven’t been able to keep down solid food for days now, had my third seizure this week just yesterday, and Monty…

I cut my tired eyes over to him, to where he’s standing next to the hospital bed. I can see him struggling, his lips quivering, his eyes closed as he mouths ‘ _stay positive_ ’ over and over and over and _over_.

“So what does—what does that mean?” he asks, finally, after the silence has strained on a touch too long. “A kidney transplant? Or—or—what was that word, Percy, that Felicity kept saying? Dia-something—”

“Dialysis,” I say.

“—Dialysis!” he says triumphantly, his hand squeezing my shoulder, shaking me just slightly. It hurts my sore muscles, but I don’t try and move him. Not as he looks so hopefully toward the doctor.

Dr. Robles hedges. “Well… dialysis is a symptom-fix rather than a cause-fix. It will keep Percy alive for a while, but ideally, we would be looking at a kidney transplant.”

“Ideally,” Monty repeats faintly.

A somber nod. “Mr. Newton… Percy… what I’m saying is that I don’t think a kidney transplant is a viable option right now. I don’t think you’re strong enough for the surgery, and with the infection in your blood we’re looking at more organ failure down the line. We’ll keep treating the infection to see if we can beat it yet, but if we can’t…”

He says more words, gives us his best prognosis with his fanciest medical knowledge, but all I’m aware of is Monty’s hand, squeezing my shoulder tighter, and tighter, and tighter.

**It's my life, it's my time, we've been gettin' nowhere**

One week before I die, I’m having seizures nearly every day.

Months ago, before all this began, I was taking meds to lessen the severity of the tonic-clonic seizures. I had hope, back then, of living a long, full life with Monty. And then, when the trouble began, I had hope of getting through this. Now the meds are failing me, breakthrough seizures happening more often than not. My body isn’t processing the medication very well—it’s not processing anything very well anymore. There is a tube that goes up my nose and down my throat that the doctors push liquid food through, dialysis machines that I’m hooked up to every day, IVs and monitors and—

But I don’t want to talk about that. I say as much to the social worker and the counselor who have come to talk to me about what could be the end of my life. Palliative care, they call this—they’re supposed to improve my life and provide comfort for however long I have left.

“We’re the gardeners,” the counselor said to me when we first met. “We can’t stop a hurricane, but we can pull the weeds and trim the branches.”

I take a deep breath, as deep as my lousy lungs will let me, letting my trembling hands relax on my lap. The tremors don’t really stop anymore, but I don’t put up a fuss about it. I have no desire to draw a straight line, no desire to hold a baby—no desire to do much of anything, really. I sleep, and seize, and sleep some more.

Monty, though… I turn my head to find him staring glassily through the counselor as if she’s not even there. His hand is tangled up in my blankets—I reach out and unwind the fibers from his fingers, slipping his hand into mine. I’m scared, but I’m holding it together because Monty? Monty is falling apart. A little or a lot, it’s hard to tell, but I feel as if I have to be strong for him.

A curl of resentment shoots through me as I think that, quickly squashed by the exhaustion and the weakness and the fact that I don’t want to be mad at Monty, not now, not so close to the end. He’s stayed with me every day and night that I’ve let him for the past however many months. He would have stayed the entire time, without leaving my side once, if I had let him.

I stare at his knuckles, watching as his hand tightens on mine. I haven’t kicked him out of the room since my kidneys started to go because what I’m really afraid of, what really _really_ scares me, is missing a single moment of his presence. Even if he no longer smiles, I refuse to miss the way his dimples show when he frowns. Missing that, missing the way his hands are always warmer than mine or the way the blue of his eyes shines oddly bright in the lighting of a hospital room… if I die without seeing Monty’s face one last time… god. 

I will never forgive myself.

**You've got no means for wanderlust**

Four days before I die, I have, you guessed it, another seizure. The difference this time is that it takes me a while to come around, and when I do everything is wonky and not-quite-real.

Felicity is here, I know because I hear her voice calling my name. It’s like a lantern off in the distance, suffocating in unholy fog. My hazy head wonders just when she arrived, how long she’s been here. I’ve been getting a lot of visitors lately, but I haven’t always been properly awake to greet them. It feels endless, the number of people I know. My aunt and uncle, Helena and Dante, Scipio and Georgie and the rest of the crew… even Pascal, the man from the pharmacy, has come to see me.

I blink, wheezing, the world wavering around me. I breathe in and the world sharpens for an instant, and then I begin to cough. It doesn’t stop. The fog is only getting worse. The lantern is suffocating, the sky is suffocating, I am suffocating… there is no relief for the coughing rattling my chest. Nothing feels real except the pain blooming in my lungs.

Distantly I feel a hand on my sternum, and I know it’s Monty. He shouldn’t be here, not like this. He’s a free spirit, trapped here. I remember the days of our youth, of taking road trips around Europe and all the trouble we got in. I’m anchoring him here with me, dragging him inexplicably toward the bottom of the seafloor. 

I cough, and gasp, and then finally the fit tapers off. I reach a hand out into the fog, my tongue slurring words that even I can’t understand. “Shhh,” he says, stroking gentle fingers through my hair, other hand rubbing circles on my chest. “Just rest, love. I’ll be here when you wake.”

I’m not sure he will. He’s tried so hard, fought so fiercely, to stay positive for me. Despite all that energy, despite all that he’s a force for good, despite his strength… despite all of it, I’m not sure if I will wake up again if I go to sleep now. 

This is the end. There is no doubt about it anymore. 

It’s getting so hard to keep my eyes open.

**All is quiet in the yard**

Two days before I die, Scipio comes to visit me and kicks Monty out of the room for the first time in weeks.

At this point, I have been in a coma for two days. I’ve found that it’s true, what they say about comatose patients. They really can hear what’s going on around them. It’s strange, as if it’s not quite real—it comes to me from a distance, fading in and out between my dreams. The sound of the heart monitor ebbs and flows like the tide.

Back to Scipio, who sits down in Monty’s chair, drawing it up as close to the bed as it will go. For a moment I think that he’s just here to give Monty a break, but after a long stretch of silence, he begins to speak, as if we were having a conversation and he was just waiting for his turn.

“The trip from Barbados to England was a hard one. I’ve told you that story before. I’ve told you about indentured servitude and human traffickers. Hardship. That was my challenge. My fight. The test of my faith.”

He pauses, his breathing slow and steady in the silence just beside the beep of the heart monitor. Then he continues, his accented voice softer. I imagine him taking my hand, patting it softly. “Percy… this is your fight. This is your test. Now is the time to fight.”

Another pause, and I imagine how he’d look, with his bearded face bent over me, the gray shooting through his hair stark against the darkness of his skin. It takes a while for him to continue this time, and then…

“No one is going to blame you if you let go now. But Percy, Percy… please try to come back. Don’t give in until you’ve used up all your fight. Alright?”

 _Alright_ , I want to say. I want to reassure him that no one wants this less than I do. But knowing I want to live does not change the fact that I also know how hard I’d have to fight, and I know I don’t have it in me anymore.

Still, his words make me realize that I’ve stopped fighting at all. That I’ve accepted my fate, accepted the fact that I’m going to slip away in my sleep. I am complacent.

Well, no longer. I am not dead and buried just yet. I have one thing left to do.

With this in mind, I make a bid for the light above.

**Stars so bright to hide the dark**

Six hours before I die and four days after slipping into the coma, two things happen, aside from the flatline itself. One, Monty buys one of those sterile plastic-wrapped plushies from the hospital gift shop to leave at my side, and two… I wake up.

It’s as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone else, though I saw something similar on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy once. I don’t watch Grey’s often, mostly because _hospitals, been there done that_ , but this one… it was one where a man had something called a surge—he was comatose after a plane crash, and then, just before the end, he woke up. Was upright, talking, laughing, joking… and then, by evening, he was dead. That idea of the surge… it must have stuck with me because that is exactly what I do.

I first become aware of someone moving my arm. Not the one with the IV and pulse ox sensor that the nurses usually mess with, but the other one, the one that Monty holds. I allow it to happen, too out of it to do much else, though I frown when the arm is set down again, now pinning something soft and squishy against my side. I don’t understand what’s happening. I need to see to understand. 

For the first time in what feels like centuries, I feel the physical need to open my eyes.

It’s hard, but not as hard as I’d somehow imagined. It is, instead, as if I am ready to rise to the challenge, ready to see and be present, as if my body was just waiting for me to catch up.

The first thing I see is a blurry ceiling. The heart monitor, familiar too many times over, is beating a slow but steady rhythm somewhere off to the side. There is the smell of antiseptic on the air, sharp on my dusty tongue. 

I squint, focusing on lowering my gaze toward my chest. Blurry ceiling, blurry walls, IV rack and antibiotics in a sack with a tube that I know leads to my arm…

That’s when I find Monty, head bent over me, adjusting something that looks suspiciously like a plush dog. Not just any dog, though—a golden retriever, like I always said I wanted as a kid but no one would get me. 

“Lucky?” I say, referencing the name of the imaginary golden retriever I used to pretend followed me everywhere. Monty starts, his head jerking around to face me at the sound of my scratchy voice. His eyes are wide, his mouth open in an O. And then, just like that, he breaks into the widest smile I think I’ve ever seen, dimples cutting into his cheeks.

**They're waiting for it, you're waiting for it**

Four hours before I die, two hours after waking up for the last time, I say my last goodbyes.

It’s hard to do, mostly because Monty keeps saying things like, “They kept telling me to prepare for the worst but you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be _okay_.” The exhaustion in my bones, which had lifted temporarily with the lift of my eyelids, is slowly bearing back down on me as they close again. Monty thinks I’m just tired, understandably, but it’s more than that. I’m ready.

Still, I do fight a little bit, forcing my eyes back open when they slip closed so that I can stare a little longer at the face that has stayed by my side for as long as I can remember. Since before my memory starts, Monty has been there. I don’t know who I am without him.

I don’t want to cry. Instead, I try to think of a metaphor for every part of him, painting a landscape in my mind that is just Monty, Monty, Monty. His hair is like the sunbeams that break free through the clouds. His skin is like fine beach sand. His lips are pink seashells. His eyes… his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes, are the vast expanses of the very sky above. I could lay here and look up forever. And I think, as this moment stretches out into a small eternity, that it’s not the dog that’s lucky. It’s me. It’s always been me. Lucky to have Monty in my life, lucky to love him, lucky that he loves me, too.

I can’t help the smile that curves across my face under the oxygen mask. I wriggle my fingers and wait until he laughs and slides his hand into mine, holding it tight tight tight. Then I take a deep breath and say, “Santorini. You remember Santorini?”

“Which part?” Monty laughs. “Bad first-time sex? Getting my hair wet? The fact that you pulled me, screaming, over the edge of a cliff and called it fun?”

“I didn’t pull. I asked,” I say.

“And I still can’t believe I said yes.” His eyes crinkle as he smiles, white fluffy clouds obscuring a bit of the sky. His teeth are ocean stones, so white and smooth, beautiful. 

“Santorini…” I hum.

“…What are you thinking about?” Monty asks.

I’m thinking a lot of things. About how it was the first time I let myself believe we’d have a future together, a real future. About how Monty looked with his cheeks and nose dusted red, the freckles that popped up under the unrelenting sun. About the inescapable heat, about sleeping with Monty anyway and waking up all but stuck together come morning, his limbs becoming my limbs becoming ours.

I don’t say any of them. The thoughts are scattering even as I think them. My eyes close and I open them again. I’m too weak to lift my head and kiss him, so I do the next best thing and, my voice barely a whisper, say, “You know I love you, don’t you?”

“Save your breath, tell me later,” Monty says, but there is no later. I have to do this now or it’s never, now or it’s gone for good. 

“I love you,” I say.

“I know, Percy, I know,” he says back.

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

**You pull it apart and you're just left there**

I’m not sure when I stop saying the words out loud, those three syllables trailing off on my lips as I slip under again. All I know is that with my dying breath, my last words, I want Monty to know he is loved, that I love him, that that has never changed and _will_ never change. Then I go under and I don’t come back up.

Death is a funny thing. Just as bacteria are funny things. It seems like the last thing you’d want to do if you were a bacteria would be to kill your host, but alas, that is exactly what happens to millions of people every year. That is what happens to me. The infection in my blood, the one that shut down my lungs and my kidneys and my stomach, then slowly but surely shuts down my heart. It only takes four hours to do it.

I’m not sure what I expect of death. I don’t know if it’ll be a slow slide into a black abyss, or maybe an excruciatingly painful ordeal that tests my sanity. I was scared, before, of dying… but as it actually approaches I am distant.

With a start, I realize that this is because I am, in a literal sense, distanced from my body. The world coalesces around me like stacked lenses coming into focus—I am standing behind Monty, looking over his shoulder at myself. The self I’ve become. The thin, ashy, sickly person who inhabited my life toward the end. I hum, looking down. The body in the bed is still breathing, short, ragged breaths in and out, but it is no longer me.

I know, in the way that one does, that I can’t reach Monty from where I am now. That doesn’t stop me from setting my hand on his shoulder. It rests there, translucent and unfelt. I wish I could do more. I can tell that he’s still struggling. He’s struggling so hard with the idea that I was just awake, just talking to him. He’s not ready for me to go.

Whether he’s ready or not, however, I know I can’t stay here long. My body is so weak… the thread tying me here is as thin as a single strand of hair. When it snaps I don’t know what will happen—I don’t know what comes next. I used to think, as a kid, that heaven and hell were my only options, but now, after everything? The world is huge, full of so many different beliefs and ideas. Who knows which one is right, if any? Who knows where we end up?

“Percy, please,” Monty says. He’s talking to me, but there’s some undercurrent, something not intended for my ears. Who he’s talking to I’m not sure—the nurses? The doctors? Felicity, standing behind him? God?—but I know that his prayers won’t be answered today. Not today.

“Please.”

“ _Please_.”

“ _Please_ …”

And the thread snaps.

**Different place, different time**

**All the stars are in their prime**

Time is different, in death. It’s hard to explain just what it is, but I can tell you what it’s not: linear. The moment I am free from my body, I am a thousand iterations of myself—a million, a _trillion_ versions of Percy Newton. I can see past lives, stretching back toward infinity… and ahead of me the same, futures lives stretching forward toward eternity. There are so many timelines that it’s dizzying.

On a whim, I snatch at one as if I might catch it. To my utter surprise, it comes free from the tangle, spreading out before me, events like a string of fairy lights. I see what could have been; what was, in another universe. I see me and Monty in the hospital, waiting anxiously. Dr. Robles is in front of us, giving us news, and as his voice ebbs in like the tide I see Monty break into incredulous laughter. He turns to me, raising his hands—I’m stunned, but at his insistence I raise my hands as well, interlocking my fingers with his. We celebrate. 

I watch, fascinated, as I get better, stronger, day after day. This… is a universe where I got better. A universe where the infection didn’t rob me of my life. The me from this universe is free to live his life just like I always wanted to—with Monty, every day, for the next fifty years.

It’s not all happy. There are fights, and there is frustration. There is pain, always. Monty spends the last ten years of his life losing his memories. But I stay with him through it all. I wouldn’t have it any other way, not in the life where I survived to have it at all. Even though he doesn’t know me at the end, even though he needs help to eat and stand and use the bathroom. Because even in all that pain, there is still good. There is still love. I see it when the music comes on.

Every day, the nurse who takes care of me and Monty but mostly Monty comes in and turns on the radio. Some days it’s to the jazz station. Sometimes pop. Sometimes classical. But whatever it is, Monty always, _always_ perks up when the music comes on. It doesn’t matter what kind. 

“I’m waiting for my husband,” he says to me most days, a twinkle in his eye. “But while I wait would you do me the honor of dancing with me?”

I don’t tell him that I _am_ his husband, just nod my head and take his hand, holding most of his weight as we shuffle back and forth completely at odds with the tempo.

And I am home.

**You go down the longest road** **…**

The fairy lights fade away, the timeline disappearing from between my fingers. I hardly wait before I grab another, letting it play out between my outstretched hands. In another life, I watch as the heart monitor flatlines, as my wheezing chest comes to a still. I watch as Monty lets out an awful, awful sound—like a choked sob, something from deep in his chest. Felicity takes a step forward from where she was standing next to the door, as if to come guide him away.

The look on his face stops her. She raises her hands in surrender and backs away again.

The room is silent as the nurses quietly take away the oxygen and the IVs. Then, his hands shaking, Monty begins to take off his shoes. He slips out of his jacket, brushes his hair back behind his ears, and then, just like that, he climbs into the bed with me, so, so careful. 

“I’m here, love,” he says, his voice wavering. He leans over, presses a kiss to my still cheek, pulls me close until my nose is resting against the hollow of his throat. He runs his hand through my hair. “I’m here, I’m here.”

And there he stays. For one hour, two. Three. Four. Until the doctors tell him that he can’t stay any longer. Then Monty gets up, puts his jacket and his shoes back on, walks past Felicity, and leaves the hospital. 

I know what I expect of him. It’s not kind, but I expect him to go out that very night and get wholly, entirely smashed.

And I’m not wrong, not at first. His first stop is a bar. But one drink in and he grits his teeth, leaves all his cash for the bartender—easily five times the cost of the drink—and begins walking.

I don’t know where he’s going, but he seems to. It’s not long before he arrives at, of all places, a church. He goes up to the door, opens it, and goes inside.

And then, with a strange sense of calm, he tells the Lord to go fuck himself.

He’s angry. He grieves. But he survives. He lives on beyond me. A full life, a happy life, full of life and music and friends. And a grave, my grave, which he visits often, telling me everything about it, until his bad days get too bad and his lucid days are too far between. He manages to come one last time, saying, “I didn’t expect to live so long. I never thought I’d have to watch you go before me. But I outlived my father, so that’s a plus.”

He laughs. I laugh. And it’s like we’re together once again.

**All the cars turn to rust**

This timeline, too, fades away as it comes to an end. I reach out again, find another string. And then, after that one, another. And another. And another. 

I’m looking for something, I find, after I’ve seen a dozen or so of these universes. Every timeline I look at is… not quite right. I don’t know what would be right, don’t know what I’m looking for… not, at least, until I find it. I know this is the one because all the others cease to exist. This is our timeline, the true timeline.

It begins like many of them have. Me sick in bed, Monty beside me. I flatline. I leave. Monty stays.

But this time… this time he doesn’t just stop at the bar. He stays there. Until nearly closing time, when Felicity comes to find him. The look on her face… pity and sadness… I want to turn away.

I don’t, though. Because this is Monty, this is our reality. I need to see this through. Even as Monty slips back into old habits. He drinks more nights than not, has screaming matches with Felicity when she tries to tell him he’s had enough, loses his job. But that’s not all. First he gets drunk… then he gets suicidal… and then… well, that’s it. It comes to an end when he wraps his car around a tree late one night, dying on impact. 

I jerk back, freeing myself from the timeline. In the not-quite-heaven-not-quite-void space that I inhabit, the vantage point from which I’ve seen everything there is to see, I am alone. I wonder, for a moment, if this is actually hell, just without the fire and the brimstone.

Then I hear my name, said by a voice I know too well. I close my eyes. It would seem too good to be true, if the route he took to get here weren’t so awful. 

“Percy, I…” he starts, trailing off. He sounds nervous, like he was before our first time in Santorini. He sounds… scared.

I should be angry. I should be _furious_. I open my eyes and there he stands, his hands hanging limp at his sides and his lip caught between his teeth, dressed the same way he’s always dressed. His eyes meet mine and I feel the weight of the sky crash over me. I can’t hold onto my emotions. One step, two, three, and I pull him into the tightest hug I possibly can. “You idiot, you absolute bloody _moron_ …” I say, hugging him like I will never let go again.

I can feel the smile he cracks against my shoulder, small and self-deprecating. “I couldn’t do it, Perce. I just… you are my _everything_.”

A tear slides down my face, one then two then a whole flood of them. I press my cheek to Monty’s hair, still clutching him so tight, so tight. I cry, for all the lifetimes we lost. And this one, the worst possible one. We’re together again, but god, at what cost? The only timeline that can compare to the pain of this one was the one where Monty killed himself at sixteen and I lived on beyond him.

It’s so much. So, so much. I press a kiss to his cheek, both cheeks, his nose and forehead and chin. To the sad smile on his lips. I want to spend an eternity here with him, just like this. I want to comfort him, and yell at him, and love him just the way we are, dysfunctional and lopsided and broken, forever. 

But we can’t stay here. That’s not how this works. We have lives ahead of us, waiting. The wheel must turn. So I take a deep breath, and share one more kiss with him. Then I step back, reaching out a hand.

“You had better not do that again, you understand me?” I say, as he threads his fingers through mine. 

He laughs, his dimples showing. “No promises,” he says. “But I’ll make you a compromise.”

“Oh?”

“I promise that I will love you again, in this life and the next and the next. I promise that if there is a universe where I live, I will find you and I will love you. I promise to never stop loving you.”

“I guess that will have to do,” I say. And we walk together into the light.

**Hold me down, Hold me down**

**Hope will be found, Follow me**

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers!


End file.
